Building the Capacity of Health Centers to Respond to COVID-19

As part of our efforts to support health centers’ response COVID-19 pandemic, NACHC is providing education, evidence-based research, and resources to build health centers’ capacity to more effectively respond to COVID-19 and future public health emergencies and better serve their patients. We are conducting this work in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and in coordination with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

We will continuously update this page with the latest project developments and learnings. View NACHC’s main COVID-19 information hub.

COVID-19 Vaccine Communications Toolkit	COVID-19 Conversations	COVID-19 Response and Recovery E-Newsletter
Multi-State Quality Improvement Effort	Crisis Business Continuity Planning Tools and Resources	Microplanning for COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery in Health Centers
Ask Me Anything Series	WATCH: 3-Part National Strategy COVID-19 Response Learning Series	Resources

COVID-19 Vaccine Communications Toolkit

NACHC created a communications toolkit for health centers to use in explaining the benefits of vaccination to staff, patients, and the community. View toolkit.

Visit the toolkit to find key vaccine messages, sample social media posts and graphics, selfie signs, and more resources. Most of these resources have been translated into multiple languages: Haitian, Hmong, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog Traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese.

Health Center Vaccination Posters: Download, print and hang in your health center (in standard printer size) English I Spanish

COVID-19 Conversations

Watch the video of our conversation with Amy Taylor, Regional Vice President, Community Health Center, Inc. (CHC). Taylor shares some of the strategies and innovative partnerships the health center is leveraging to educate teens and their parents about the COVID-19 vaccine and make it easily accessible to them.

Watch the video of our conversation with Jody Sahota, Advocacy and Communications Manager, Alameda Health Consortium. Sahota shares with NACHC how the consortium developed and disseminated audience-informed, multicultural and multilingual communication to help build vaccine confidence, clarify misinformation, and build public acceptance of mask wearing in the East Bay California area with its campaign Mask On to Move On.

Watch the video of our conversation with Jean D. Pierre, LCSW, MBA/HA, Vice President and Chief Behavioral Officer at Community Health of South Florida (CHSF). Jean shares with us how CHSF is addressing current challenges facing staff and leadership during this second wave of the pandemic and winter holiday season, including emotional well-being.

Watch the video of our conversation with Kenneth H. Mayer, M.D., Medical Research Director, Fenway Health and Co-Director, The Fenway Institute, about learnings from his team’s experience recruiting ethnically diverse populations to participate in COVID-19 vaccine trials.

Watch the video of our conversation with Brian Toomey, MSW, CEO, Piedmont Health, about how his health center is building COVID-19 vaccine confidence among staff, ensuring equitable distribution of the vaccine, and how he continues to create positive morale among staff nearly one year into the pandemic.

Watch the video of our conversation with Ethan Kerns, DDS, Chief Dental Officer, Salud Family Health Centers. Dr. Kerns shares how his dental team is actively engaged in supporting Salud’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts in many roles.

COVID-19 Response and Recovery E-Newsletter

This monthly e-newsletter keeps health centers and state primary care association (PCA) leadership and care teams consistently informed about CDC/NACHC’s COVID-19 pandemic response and recovery strategies, programs, resources, and shares the latest learnings from health centers’ COVID-19 response.

Past Issues:

View May issue
View April issue
View March issue
View February issue
View January issue
View December issue
View November issue
View October issue

Multi-State Quality Improvement Effort

This year-long project is designed to build an infrastructure for data aggregation and quality improvement. NACHC is collaborating with six regional and state primary care associations and health center-controlled network (HCCN) partners to support better utilization of existing data, systems, and data collection of their patient populations that will describe the health burden, disparities, and overall impact of COVID-19.

Data will be gathered, analyzed, and entered into the NACHC registry on COVID-19 for quality improvement, public health surveillance, and outcomes evaluation. Registry data will be used to inform local, state, and national COVID-19 response efforts.

Crisis Business Continuity Planning Tools and Resources

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of health centers’ infrastructure, clinical care, staff, and patients. Challenges include:

- quickly creating new patient care procedures and processes
- addressing staff’s mental, emotional, and physical stress, and
- finding new revenue streams when traditional ones were temporarily on hold.

View the new manual, Creating a Business Continuity Plan for Your Health Center, which provides community health centers and Primary Care Associations with an easy-to-use-tool to create and/or improve their business continuity plan (BCP) and program. The manual guides users through the nine key components of a BCP with dozens of templates and sample tools that can be adapted through each step of the BCP process. These business continuity planning products and resources will assist health center leadership teams that are developing or improving their plans for responding to COVID-19 and other business disruption crises.

NACHC’s Business Continuity Planning Institute:

Session 1: Introduction to Business Continuity Planning presentation slides and recording
Session 2: Creating a Business Continuity Plan presentation slides and recording
Session 3: Ensuring a Human Resource Strategy presentation slides and recording

Microplanning for COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery in Health Centers

Guide: Microplanning for COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery in Health Centers

This two-page guide shares “microplanning” steps for health centers to use for COVID-19 vaccination.

Go to guide.

PPT: View the PowerPoint presentation of these microplanning steps.

Ask Me Anything Series: Stay Sharp: Microplanning for Flu And COVID-19 Vaccines

Watch the recordings from December 4th, December 11th , December 18th , January 8th, January 15th, January 22nd and January 29th.

WATCH: 3-Part National Strategy COVID-19 Response Learning Series

NACHC held a three-part National Strategy COVID-19 Response Webinar Series to help health centers continue to respond, recover, and reimagine patient care in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each webinar explored different challenges and explore opportunities around: business continuity planning, data fundamentals, promising health center models, workflows, and lessons learned in response to COVID-19.

Watch Session 1: Leaning into the COVID-19 Pandemic (10/28/2020) — Watch and listen to the webinar recording.
Watch Session 2: Securing Your Path Forward (11/18/2020) — Watch and listen to the webinar recording.
Watch Session 3: Looking Over the Horizon (12/16/2020) — Watch and listen to the webinar recording.